It was 10 years ago, August 9, that Michael Brown, an 18-year-old Black youth, was gunned down by a Ferguson, Missouri pig as he stood in the street with his hands in the air. His killing sparked weeks of powerful protests and rebellion in Ferguson, which spread to campuses and cities across the country. As if to mark this anniversary, on July 6, 2024 another depraved pig—this one in Springfield, Illinois—shot and killed Sonya Massey, a 36-year-old Black woman, in her own kitchen, after she called 911 for help. 

Over the 10 years since the murder of Michael Brown, the fact is that police brutality, terror and murder have not only continued but gotten even worse—despite endless promises of “police reforms” and the beautiful uprising across the U.S. after the cold-blooded police execution of George Floyd in 2020.

Mapping Police Violence has for years been compiling and analyzing police killings nationwide—something those in power refuse to do. They have found that America's armed enforcers have killed an average of 1,147 people per year—nearly 13,400 people since 2013. This amounts to seven percent of all the homicides in the U.S. And 2023 saw the highest yearly total of police killings yet. Blacks, Latinos, and Native Americans are disproportionally killed, with Black people nearly three times more likely to be the victims of police killings than the population as a whole. The cops who murder are almost never held accountable.  

Deadliest Neighborhoods for Killings by Police

While killings by police take place all over the country, they are concentrated in the poorest sections of the inner cities. Mapping Police Violence has been analyzing data on the specific neighborhoods of cities around the country where police killings are most concentrated, beginning with Chicago and St. Louis.¹  What they are finding is horrific—massively high proportions of killings of Black people in those neighborhoods. 

In Chicago, there have been 112 people killed by the police since 2013. Black people in Chicago are 30.6 times more likely to be killed by police than whites with (as an Axios report put it) "massively higher portions of police shootings on certain streets and neighborhoods." 

In St. Louis, where police have taken the lives of at least 53 people since 2013, Black people are over 10 times more likely to be killed by cops than whites.

This is in a country where white supremacy has been woven into the fabric from the very beginning, with hundreds of years of slavery. For nearly 100 years after slavery was ended, Black people were forced to endure a system of openly racist “Jim Crow” segregation throughout the southern states, enforced by sheriffs and police, as well as KKK terror.

What’s at the Root of the Poverty and Police Terror in Chicago’s Black Ghetto?

As an article in the revcom.us American Crime series (“How Capitalism + White Supremacy Created Chicago’s Black Ghetto”) describes, millions of Black people left the South after World War 2 and came to Chicago and other northern cities, only to be systematically forced into segregated ghettos under extremely oppressive conditions—which continue today. This was the product of deliberate policies by the U.S. government and actions of the courts, local political and police forces, and racist white residents, driven by real estate and banking predators. 

The American Crime article lays out the devastating conditions people face, from poor and racist education in run-down schools to environmental hazards, the worst health care, absence of decent jobs, and more. And then there is the terror by police: 

These hellish conditions are enforced by the police who, acting like an occupying army, carry out daily harassment, beatings, torture, and murder... [They] allow and control organized crime and gangs when it serves their purpose—and crack down on them, as part of an overall clampdown on the people, at other times. They act with the official and unofficial approval of the political and legal authorities—almost never receiving punishment for murders and other crimes they carry out, even in front of witnesses or when caught on video. 

This is what living in Chicago's segregated ghettos—and in similar neighborhoods of oppressed people across the country—has meant for millions of Black people, as well as Latinos and Native Americans, decade after decade.² All violently enforced by the pigs, continuing to today.

We Don’t Have to Live This Way!

In his 2020 article “Lynching, Murder by Police—Damn This Whole System! We Don’t Have to Live This Way!,” revolutionary leader Bob Avakian wrote:

[A]ll young Black males (and this is increasingly true of females as well) are forced to go through life in this country with the constant fear of being subjected to harassment, brutality and even outright murder by the police. But don’t waste time waiting for the government to pass a bill making police brutality and murder a hate crime! 

All this brutality and terror is built into this system in this country, and this system could not exist without it. As long as this system is in power and in effect, all this will go on... and on... and on.

But we can very well exist without this system. In fact, we can live in a radically different and much better world once this system has been swept away through the mass revolutionary action of the masses of people who are constantly subjected to, and all those who refuse to accept, the very real horrors continually perpetrated by this system, here and all over the world. 

As I have said before:

in fundamental terms, we have two choices: either, live with all this—and condemn future generations to the same, or worse, if they have a future at all—or, make revolution!